


Running Out of Daylight

by hesychasm (Jintian)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-08
Updated: 2007-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:40:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/hesychasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looks like this one's gonna be a bitch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Out of Daylight

  
_Alamogordo, New Mexico_

"All we gotta do is torch it," Dean had said. "Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am."

It was a haunted house straight out of a hunter's compendium of haunted houses. Salt the doors and windows, drench the rest in gasoline, light 'er up. They could have done it in their sleep. But walking into the place, Sam had a feeling: something was wrong, something that gripped him cold and brought him to a stop just inside the doorway, under the broken chandelier. Maybe it was the way the shadows fell across the floor without moving, even though he could see through the windows how the wind was freaking out the trees outside, could hear the wild branches scraping against the house. It was wrong and it looked wrong and it felt wrong. Outside the house, the wind howled like a man being murdered but inside, the man was already dead and rotting. Sam looked up at the cracked ceiling and the peeling lintels and suddenly felt absolutely fucking terrified.

Dean edged in front of him, giving him a look, _you punking out or what?_ , already pouring gasoline onto the floor. Sam croaked, "Dean, wait --" but that was all he could manage before the hairs on the back of his neck screamed to life, and the spirit of the house picked them up and bounced them off the walls.

The gas can ripped out of Dean's hands and shot through one of the windows, shattering glass. "O-kay," Dean spat. "Looks like this one's gonna be a _bitch_."

Sam managed to catch his breath. "We need to get out of here."

"We _need_ to burn this bastard--"

" _Forget_ the burning, let's _go_."

He grabbed Dean's collar and started hauling him off, past the dead shadows and toward the front door he could have sworn they'd left open behind them. Dean sputtered and tried to break free -- "The fuck are you doing?" -- but Sam just wrapped an arm around Dean's neck and started using his size advantage for all it was worth.

He grabbed the doorknob of the door they _had_ left open, he was sure of it, dammit, and the spirit promptly knocked him and Dean apart, pinning them both to opposite walls of the foyer.

And he knew it was just an extra-malevolent spirit, just a crazy old bastard crazier than usual, but for a second his irrational terror spiked: suddenly he was back in that cabin with the Colt on the table, helpless against the wall while the yellow-eyed demon in Dad's body taunted them and Dean pleaded and begged and bled while the Colt just lay there, just kept right on staying on the table.

"Sammy, you okay?" Dean shouted.

The broken chandelier flickered to life, illuminating the foyer and his brother spread-eagled against the opposite wall, feet dangling a foot above the floor. Glass sleeted down and slashed at both of them. Sam felt cuts open on his cheeks, burning with exposure. He saw Dean's lip had been split, and there was blood running from his hairline.

" _Sam_ , dammit! Answer me!"

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" he called back. But the fear clawed at him, making him crazy like the spirit, and Dean was over there, Dean was bleeding, dying, and he couldn't fucking _move_ \--

The windows burst, letting in the sound of the furious wind outside and the tree branches, and Sam had only a split second to register the sight of glass shards flying toward them, bigger than his hand.

He felt the fear pull something _loose_ inside him, and suddenly the gasoline on the floor burst into flames.

"Oh, shit--" he heard himself say.

The flames hurried through the dry wood of the house, licking up the staircase and along the floor toward them. The house trembled and Sam fell to his hands and knees, set free. He looked across, and Dean was already on his feet, charging past the quickly-spreading fire to reach Sam and pull him up.

"Let's get the hell out of here already," Dean said. He got an arm around Sam's waist and together they stumbled for the door, the flames already creating an inferno behind them, spreading across the ceiling and enveloping the broken chandelier.

"I think I did this," Sam said numbly, when they were in the yard. He looked back. Couldn't help it, his brain wanting to register the moment, to acknowledge it was truly happening, but the house was already starting to crumble beneath the weight of its own destruction. Dean pulled him to the Impala, getting him inside, shutting the door, getting in behind the wheel, but Sam barely comprehended any of it. He felt hollowed out, empty, and thought, _This is shellshock. This is me, a shell._ The fire in his head rolled through the emptiness, starting itself over and over, flaring up out of nothing to engulf the house in a relentless loop.

"Sammy?" Dean inquired, a little wildly, but when Sam didn't answer he just clenched his jaw and started the car.

*

Dean let Sam shower first. He sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over, listening to the water, trying not to think about what Sam had said and what he'd seen -- what he thought he'd seen -- Sam do with his own two eyes. The car ride had been totally silent and he couldn't shake the feeling that his own inability to talk to Sam, to question, to say _what the fuck happened back there?_ had made the both of them guilty of something he couldn't even articulate.

God, his head was spinning. He rubbed his forehead, then realized he was smearing gunky blood around with fingers that still smelled like gasoline, then thought, fuck it, and just laid back on the bed.

Sam. Sammy. Sammy had lit that fire. It hadn't been the spirit, it hadn't been the house, it hadn't been anything but his little brother. Once thought, it couldn't be unthought. Sammy had lit that fire.

"Fuck," Dean breathed.

He must have dozed off, because suddenly he was opening his eyes when he hadn't even realized they were closed, and it was because he could hear Sam throwing up through the open door of the bathroom, losing what was left of the nachos and dip they'd had for lunch, forever ago.

Dean got the hell out of bed and was at Sam's side in three seconds flat. "Sam," he said, soft and low.

The smell was horrible, even underneath clean soap and shampoo, and the light was far too bright and unforgiving. Sam's long back, curved over the toilet bowl, was as pale as a spirit, and the skin of his naked shoulder beneath Dean's hand was cold and clammy.

"Okay, Sammy," Dean said, "take it easy, you're all right," and trying to believe it.

Some minutes later, Sam quieted and just knelt on the floor, forehead on the edge of the toilet seat, breath hitching a little. Dean helped him up, reaching past him to flush the toilet and grab a towel to wrap around Sam's hips. He tore the cellophane off of one of the little plastic cups, filled it with water from the sink, and handed it over.

Sam drank without meeting Dean's eyes. When it was empty, he clutched the cup in his two big hands and both he and Dean studied the last few water droplets sliding down from the plastic rim.

"We never --" Sam began, his voice hoarse. "We never thought that maybe it _wasn't_ the demon that started those fires."

"Sam, don't you even start." He wanted to shower and he wanted to sleep and he was a fucking pansy ass because most of all he just wanted to wake up the next morning and have it _not_ be a world where Sam could light fires like that.

"It can't just be a coincidence," Sam said. "That I can do this, the way Mom and Jess died --"

"They died because the demon killed them," Dean said, hating the harshness of the words even as he spoke them. "Anyway, you've never been able to do this before, you don't know there's a connection."

"My weird abilities _are_ connected to those fires and that demon, Dean, haven't you been paying attention?" Sam was always the one who liked to talk, who needed to talk, who hated letting the venom fester in a bite. But he'd been pretty damn closemouthed after they basically gave up the search for Ava, and now he was trembling, like everything he'd been keeping inside was just wanting to burst out.

When in denial, stall. "We'll talk about this in the morning." Dean took the plastic cup from Sam and filled it up one more time, waited until Sam gulped it down, and then pushed him out into the room and toward the nearest bed. Sam tumbled down, all six-foot plus of long bone and muscle, and Dean somehow got him under the covers and hit the switch for the lamps between the beds, so that the room was totally dark.

"I'm gonna shower now," Dean said, still speaking softly, like Sam was a horse he might spook. "We can sleep a few hours, then hit the road, early. I don't think that spirit's going to be fucking with anyone else." He patted Sam's shoulder -- still so cool to the touch -- and straightened.

"Dean," Sam whispered, and Dean whipped back around.

"Go to sleep," Dean said, when he knew he had his voice under control. "Sammy, we'll deal with it in the morning."

But when he got out of the shower and into his own bed, he knew Sam was still awake. He lay on his side, staring at Sam's form dimly lit by the neon of the motel sign in the parking lot, and tried to follow his own advice, tried like hell not to think about that house burning down as he helped Sam away.

\-- about carrying him out of the burning house in Lawrence --

Sammy had turned twenty-four just a month ago, in Kansas, coincidentally, deep in some shithole part of the state where they were salting and burning the bones of a young boy beaten and left to die twenty years prior. Sitting on the hood of the Impala, watching the last of the flames sputter, Dean clinked the neck of his beer bottle against Sam's and said, "Happy Birthday, freak." He tried to get them reminiscing about past birthdays on the road, the ones their dad hadn't left them to go hunting on, anyway, but Sam hadn't felt like talking. So instead Dean drank his beer and thought about other hunts they'd been on, simpler times when all they had to deal with was a crazy spirit or the occasional exorcism, and Dad was the only one who went after things that couldn't be explained.

He tossed and turned for an hour on the mattress that smelled like bleached out cigarettes, listening to Sam breathing wide awake, and it was no fucking good. "Dammit." Dean swung his legs over the side of the bed and got up, groping for the lights again. The sudden brightness punched his eyeballs and he cursed, but Sam, lying there on his back with his eyes open, didn't even blink. "Let's go," Dean said. "Waste of plastic if we're not gonna sleep, might as well get moving."

He pulled on some clothes and tossed Sam whatever was clean and in reach. Sam dressed quietly, efficiently, and together they gathered up the rest of their shit and headed out to the car.

*

Twenty minutes southwest of Alamogordo, Dean suddenly pulled the car off the road. Sam didn't question him, just watched the little strip of lightened sky peeking over the mountains to their right. Dean drove on a narrow winding ribbon of asphalt that soon gave way to something smoother, and Sam looked around and realized they were surrounded by sand dunes, rising up around them like ghostly waves, impossibly high.

"Where is this?" he said, breaking the silence.

"White Sands. Dad and I once tracked a black dog out here."

The pre-dawn light had increased by the time Dean found a place to stop the car. The dunes now were purple, some of them perfectly smooth, others rippled by wind. The top edges were clean and sharp, occasionally interrupted by a bit of scrub brush.

"Come on," Dean said, and started climbing.

The sand slipped under Sam's feet. He still felt weak and hollowed out, so he put his hand down to help himself along. It was cool on the surface but warm just beneath, leftover from yesterday's heat. Above him, Dean was a dark figure cutting diagonally toward the top.

It was utterly still, but in a way that was undeniably, fundamentally different from the spirit's house: here the stillness was natural, arising out of the sheltered location, the distance from civilization, the fragile hour. They wandered across the dunes, walking slowly, breathing in the cool dry air, watching the mountains in the distance sharpen and reveal their features as the light intensified.

Finally, when the red edge of the sun appeared, they sat down in the sand. Sam trailed his fingers through it, feeling the warmth and flow of the grains, occasionally looking back to see whether their footprints still marked the path they had taken. The wind, so violent the night before, just barely kissed his face, soothing the cuts and scrapes rather than antagonizing them.

"This is amazing," Sam said. He could see, now that there was enough light, that the sand really was white like its name, that under the noon sun it would be almost too bright to look at directly.

"Yeah," Dean said.

Sam drew patterns in the sand. He thought of the sand discs at the kids' museum where Jess worked the summer after their freshman year, the plates spinning rapidly so that each touch of your finger created a new design, more changeable than pottery.

He let the silence envelop them for a few minutes more, but the thoughts inside him swelled, needing expression. He waited until the sun had fully cleared the eastern mountains and then said, "Dean. We have to talk about this."

"Okay," Dean said. "But I'm just gonna say right out, what you're thinking is bullshit." His tone was final, but Dean had a lot of final tones.

"I started that fire," Sam said. "Started it with my _mind_ , Dean. And I know you're thinking about what that means, and if we're both thinking it, it's not bullshit."

"I'm not thinking anything like you're thinking."

They were speaking quietly, urgently, not raising their voices against the peace of their surroundings, but that somehow made what they were saying all the more frightening and weighty. "Then maybe you should be," Sam said. "Because we've talked about me going darkside, but that was before I ever did anything that was actually inherently _dangerous_ \--"

"What you can _do_ may be dangerous, but _you're_ not."

It was a harsh whisper, cutting through the space between them. It was a warning sound, but Sam felt strangely distant from it, not so much uncaring as just _relieved_ , lightheaded now that the words were out there, that he was speaking his thoughts so it was something they had to deal with, together. He plunged ahead, recklessly: "If I had something to do with Mom or Jess, anything at all --"

He felt the blow before he even realized Dean had moved, pain blossoming at his temple. Dean was on his feet and looming over him now, reaching down, grabbing fistfuls of Sam's shirt. "I told you, don't you fucking start with that."

Sam took hold of his wrists. "Dean, you can't argue with me on this one."

"Yeah, I can. I'm arguing." Dean hauled him up, his strength not quite making up for the height difference, so that Sam stumbled into him. "Anyway, whatever you did in there _saved_ our asses."

"Only because we got ourselves out. But maybe Mom didn't have time --"

"Bullshit. Dad said she was already dying. And _dammit_." Dean shoved him away. "No way in hell can you take something you _maybe_ did when you were a _baby_ , which you didn't even do anyway so can we stop fucking _talking_ about it. Fuck!" He turned abruptly and started heading back to the car, trampling over their footprints.

Sam followed, his long stride easily closing the distance. He felt wild and unreal, like an experiment, as if he were watching himself in debate club, distant and remote. Maybe he was just lobbing these crazy ideas at Dean so he could deny them and breathe sanity back into his head.

He only remembered his mother as a face in a picture he didn't even have anymore, a spirit that had spoken to him for less than a minute, as the things Dad and Dean had told him. But Jess -- Jess had been hanging around all morning, waiting for him to let down the barrier of shock. The grief came roaring back, just as new and raw as it had been in those first few weeks; it had not, apparently, been lessened at all by time or other experience. She'd been the start of all this for him, the loss that had finally made Dad's quest personal in a way his own flesh and blood hadn't, but he'd been drawing away from her memory all the same, focused on other things, other problems. She was part of an old life, one with graduation and engagement and law school after which the world would have been wide open for them. And so he'd thought that with each day he and Dean were on the road he got further and further away from the person he'd been with those dreams. But instead it was like he'd just been stretching the elastic between then and now, and here he was, snapped right back.

He knelt in the sand, remembering the day he'd surprised her at the museum. How she'd held his hand and pulled him from exhibit to exhibit, how they'd almost gotten stuck inside the Tactile Dome and Jess had teased him that it was for kids, not overgrown college boys, and he'd imagined -- just briefly, because he knew it would freak her out if she realized he'd even _thought_ about having kids with her, because they hadn't even said "I love you" yet --

"Sam." Dean was standing over him. He'd come back.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, hoarse. "I didn't mean to freak you out."

"Yeah, well, you've been freaking me out since you were born."

Sam shook his head. "I don't know what to _do_ , Dean."

He looked up and saw that Dean was squinting into the horizon, endless white sand burning beneath the sun. "Well, I don't either," Dean said. "But can't we just deal with what we _know_ , instead of leaping to crazy conclusions about what it all means?"

"Easier said than done."

"You always have to be difficult." Dean held out a hand to help Sam to his feet. "Come on, let's get outta here before we fry."

*

Dean turned the car north. Sam had suggested heading for the Roadhouse to consult with Ash about finding other babies, other fires, but Dean, thinking of Gordon and how Ellen had basically Pontius Pilate'd any responsibility for what got said about Sam, nixed the idea. They'd called instead. "Gimme four hours," Ash drawled. "Minus twenty-two, twenty-three minutes."

Now they were sitting in a diner just off the interstate on the way to Albuquerque, waiting for Ash to call back. Sam was sipping coffee; Dean poked at the greasy remnants of his blue plate special. Food cured everything.

Dean looked at Sam, his expression still pale and a little dazed from shock and lack of sleep. He hadn't even noticed that he was wearing one of Dean's overshirts and it was too small for him. Well, food cured almost everything. There was a restless truce between them now, but Dean knew better than to take comfort in it. For him, problems were best managed by the divide and conquer philosophy: separation into smaller, discrete issues, tasks he could attack and deal with and consider it progress. Sam couldn't do that: to him, it was the big picture first, every smaller thing a symptom of something larger. He made grand gestures, sweeping decisions, hoping to work a solution with a single act.

The morning was bright blue outside the diner's scrubbed and stenciled windows. Dean found it an almost offensive follow-up to the night they'd had. He spread the newspaper open over his empty plate. The world itself hadn't seemed to change much: all the headlines were of a sedate size, boring politician shit, the usual update from Iraq, the Dow had risen five points, tomorrow's forecast was more clear skies. No indication that a fundamental shift had occurred or was occurring between two demon hunting brothers from Kansas. No report about how everything they thought they'd known might now have to be entirely rewritten.

He was flipping through to the comics section -- the mom in _FoxTrot_ was a total MILF -- when he happened to see what Sam was up to on his side of the table.

"You look busy."

"Hmm?" Sam looked up from what he'd been doing, which was, as far as Dean could tell, scribbling on a few napkins. Dean tilted his head, trying to read upside down. Sam pushed the napkins over. "I'm writing up notes on the others. Max, and Andy and his twin, and Ava. And the guy from Indiana. What they could do, how well they could do it, everything we know about their personal histories with the demon."

"You looking for patterns?"

"Don't know if I'll actually find any, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to start keeping some kind of record." There was new resolve in his eyes: he was all set to change things up, pump more info out of Ash, put his Stanford brain to work and make something big happen. That was his way of dealing. That, and talking shit to death.

Dean studied the napkins -- _visions of future deaths; mother still alive_ \-- _voice-induced mind control; mother alive until induced to self-immolation_. "You sure know a lot of big words, geek." He ignored Sam's kick under the table. "It's weird, seeing them all written down like this. When they're all side by side, it seems like there's a _lot_ of them."

Sam grimaced and nodded. "A whole catalogue of freaks."

"Maybe a whole new freaky section for Dad's journal."

"Not funny, jerk."

"Don't be such a bitch, bitch." He pushed the napkins back toward Sam. "So if we find a new freak, then what?"

"I don't know," Sam said. "Warn them, I guess. Let them know they aren't alone? I mean, we should have been trying to find more of them all along. Especially after Ava." He shook his head.

Dean's phone rang while Sam was off taking a piss. "Sorry, Dean," Ash said. "Coming up bupkis on anything new. I gave you everything I could find before. But if you're just wanting to investigate supernatural fires without any babies attached, I got a couple leads on some cases."

Dean had a sudden thought. "Could you look up the history on an address real quick?"

"Give it to me."

Dean rattled off the info on the house from last night. He didn't know quite what he was expecting to find -- as far as he knew, the case was closed on that particular spirit -- but he waited patiently while Ash tapped away on his keyboard and hummed "Don't Stop Believin'" into the phone.

"Huh," Ash said.

"What?"

"There was a fire on that property in 1984. A couple and their infant girl were killed. The house was rebuilt a couple years later, 'cuz the original burned down to the foundation."

Dean's mouth went dry. "How old was the baby?"

More keyboard tapping. "Six months. To the day." Ash sounded awed. "That is _freaky_ , man. Guess you found another one after all."

"Guess so."

Sam got back to the table just as Dean was hanging up. He took one look at Dean's face and said, "What happened?"

Dean told him.

"God." Sam's expression was pinched and tight. "What if the spirit in the house was one of them? The parents, or the baby?"

"So maybe it wasn't you that started the fire, it was the spirit." It sounded lame even to Dean -- why would the spirit burn _itself_ down? But Sam was already shaking his head.

"No, the way I felt when it happened, it was the same as when I moved that dresser. It was me." He looked up and met Dean's eyes. "Dean, what if these others like me, what if I can only do what they do when I'm actually around them? I mean, maybe that one time was because I was with Max. And I could only light that fire because I was in that house, with the spirit."

Sam's eyes were getting a wide, stare-y look that Dean didn't much like. "Maybe," he said.

"Did Ash find out anything else?"

"Nothing like we want. But he had leads on a couple of cases. Might be good to take something else on, for now."

"No." Sam tapped the side of his thumb on the table. "I don't want to get distracted again."

"Distracted from _what_ , Sam? We don't exactly have a lot of info to pursue on this."

"I think we should go back to the house."

"Sammy, that place is ashes by now. Spirit's long gone."

"I just want to see. Maybe there's something left -- Dean, please."

That pleading look seriously needed to be outlawed. Rolling his eyes, Dean slid out of the booth. "Fine."

But he was right, of course. There was nothing left of the house but piles of char and ash and half of a blackened frame. At some point in the past few hours the local PD and fire department had come by to process the scene: the house was cordoned off with yellow tape, and the sad little yard was marked with tiretracks. But they must have deemed it accidental, because there wasn't any law enforcement still poking around. The property was deserted.

Sam strode up to the house, ducked under the tape, and stood right where the front doorway used to be.

"Gettin' any vibes?" Dean asked, after a while. "Hey, snap your fingers like that firestarter dude in _X-Men_."

Sam glared at him.

Dean wondered if he actually _was_ trying something, if he was standing there concentrating on whatever connection he felt with the baby that had died or been sacrificed or accidentally killed itself. He tried to brace himself for the sight of Sam lighting another fire, out here in broad daylight, on purpose this time and not accidental. But really, how the fuck did you prepare for something like _that_?

After another moment, though, Sam turned and walked back to where Dean was waiting for him. "I didn't feel anything," he said, his voice small and toneless. He wouldn't meet Dean's eyes. "I think it's gone."

Dean wanted to reach up and mess with his hair. He didn't.

"I'm just. I'm just tired of things _happening_ to me," Sam said. "You know?"

Dean knew. "We'll figure this out," he said, like it didn't matter that they didn't have any leads, that they were basically right back where they'd started, only with this freaksome new twist to their lives. Because the thing was, it was _their_ lives, plural, and Sam wasn't going to be alone in it. Not ever. "We won't get distracted," Dean promised.

Once they hit the highway, the silence between them started to get itchy, so Dean turned on the cassette player. "Ramble On" lilted from the speakers, and as Dean drove, he kept an eye on Sam paging through the rest of their father's journal, careful with sheets that had pulled loose from the rings, his long fingers occasionally tapping entries he lingered on before moving to the next. The pockets in the leather binding were stuffed with scraps and notes already, but he folded up the napkins he'd been scribbling on and tucked them in.

After a while Sam turned down the cassette player and said, "Hey, did you know Dad had a whole section in here on fire-breathing demons?" and began reading it aloud, his deep voice cutting through the wind in the open windows, bringing to life all the lore their father had collected and left to them.

**Author's Note:**

> Location notes:  
> [White Sands National Monument](http://www.nps.gov/whsa/), perhaps the most gorgeous place in the continental United States  
> [San Francisco Exploratorium](http://www.exploratorium.edu/), a place I always wished I could work.
> 
> Soundtrack:  
> Ramble On by Led Zeppelin  
> 
> 
> Comments and criticism welcome.


End file.
